Introduction
Fires. Floods. Lead. Protests. Campaigns. These days the world is rife with controversies over environmental concerns. These concerns are never just about climate or wildlife or chemicals. They’re about people who care about, use, depend on the things we live among. In this collection, edited by Aminah Taariq-Sidibe, Devika Rao, and Nikki Bonfiglio, students in Environmental Sociology at Cornell . These stories surround 3 themes:
Climate Change: Climates around the world are shifting swiftly — and so have responses to climate change. In How Climate Gentrification Gets Ignored, Tomás de last Casas explores how climate gentrification is reconfiguring Miami. They show how real estate interests capture land rights, break up communities, and justify these actions with self-serving narratives. In Controversies in Communicating Climate Change and the Environment, Aminah Taariq-Sidibe traces climate communication from Rachel Carson to David Wallace-Wells, arguing that to motivate people to work change, climate communicators need to fashion messages that resonate with diverse audiences. In When Facts Aren’t Enough: The Paradigm of Climate Change Skepticism and Denial, Madeline Gaus examines how identity, interests, and political machinations foster climate change skepticism and denial, raising the question of what posture climate activists should take in polarized times.
Creatures: As the sixth great extinction in Earth’s history unfolds, individuals, groups, and countries wrangle over wildlife and landscapes. In Japan’s Whales, Noah Schulman shows how the Japanese whaling industry worked whaling into national identity, silencing domestic critics and thwarting international efforts to regulate whaling — but also raising questions about dominant ways of seeing whaling. In Sofia Blasini Frontera: A Burning Hellscape: The Impact of Government, Industry, and Activism on Amazonian Deforestation, Sofia Blasini Frontera recounts how indigenous and vegetarian activists in Brazil push back against Amazon deforestation driven by a booming meat industry.
Contamination: Front-line communities continue to battle not just climate impacts but pollution’s threats to bodies and minds. In The Untold Story of Rural America’s Clean Water Crisis, Emily Prest unveils the hidden water contamination crisis in the rural US, arguing that urban-centric governance and agribusiness interests uphold a tyranny of the majority that resists actions that might provide rural residents with safe drinking water. In Gabe Welch: North Carolina Hog Farming: Impacts of Hog Waste on Local Communities, Gabe Welch follows North Carolina communities pushing to control pollution from hog-raising operations. Katherine Ratner rounds out the collection with Political Marginalization, Protest, and PCBs: Double Diversion in Warren County, recounting the decades-long struggle of Afton, NC residents to obtain redress for the dumping of PCBs near their homes, taking on powerful adversaries.
